Vitalik Buterin picked the name Ethereum after browsing Wikipedia articles about elements and science fiction, when he found the name, noting, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was the fact that sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel."[9]

Mining is a record-keeping service done through the use of computer processing power.[e] Miners keep the blockchain consistent, complete, and unalterable by repeatedly grouping newly broadcast transactions into a block, which is then broadcast to the network and verified by recipient nodes.[75] Each block contains a SHA-256 cryptographic hash of the previous block,[75] thus linking it to the previous block and giving the blockchain its name.[7]:ch. 7[75]

In 2014, researchers at the University of Kentucky found "robust evidence that computer programming enthusiasts and illegal activity drive interest in bitcoin, and find limited or no support for political and investment motives".[134] Australian researchers have estimated that 25% of all bitcoin users and 44% of all bitcoin transactions are associated with illegal activity as of April 2017. There were an estimated 24 million bitcoin users primarily using bitcoin for illegal activity. They held $8 billion worth of bitcoin, and made 36 million transactions valued at $72 billion.[225][226]
As can be seen from the data on this page, Ethereum’s price has been enormously volatile and therefore highly unpredictable over the short-term. However, longer-term trends are easier to predict, with fundamental metrics such as the total number of developers, community discussion and GitHub pull requests indicating a more accurate future price trend. Other methods to predict the price of Ethereum include metrics such as Network Value to Transaction ratio (NVT ratio) and the relative prices between coins. The method that we find most interesting is in that of the Ethereum-based prediction market, Augur. These predictions source the “wisdom of the crowd” to determine the likelihood of an outcome occurring and provide a significant level of insight into the market sentiment.
There are many ways you can plug into the Ethereum network, one of the easiest ways is to use its native Mist browser. Mist provides a user-friendly interface & digital wallet for users to trade & store Ether as well as write, manage, deploy and use smart contracts. Like web browsers give access and help people navigate the internet, Mist provides a portal into the world of decentralized blockchain applications.
To lower the costs, bitcoin miners have set up in places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and cooling Arctic air is free.[205] Bitcoin miners are known to use hydroelectric power in Tibet, Quebec, Washington (state), and Austria to reduce electricity costs.[204][206] Miners are attracted to suppliers such as Hydro Quebec that have energy surpluses.[207] According to a University of Cambridge study, much of bitcoin mining is done in China, where electricity is subsidized by the government.[208][209]
“A DAO consists of one or more contracts and could be funded by a group of like-minded individuals. A DAO operates completely transparently and completely independently of any human intervention, including its original creators. A DAO will stay on the network as long as it covers its survival costs and provides a useful service to its customer base” Stephen Tual, Slock.it Founder, former CCO Ethereum.
Izabella Kaminska, the editor of FT Alphaville, has pointed out that criminals are using Ethereum to run Ponzi schemes and other forms of investment fraud.[67] The article was based on a paper from the University of Cagliari, which placed the number of Ethereum smart contracts which facilitate Ponzi schemes at nearly 10% of 1384 smart contracts examined. However, it also estimated that only 0.05% of the transactions on the network were related to such contracts.[68]
In Ethereum all smart contracts are stored publicly on every node of the blockchain, which has costs.[57] Being a blockchain means it is secure by design and is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. The downside is that performance issues arise in that every node is calculating all the smart contracts in real time, resulting in lower speeds.[57] As of January 2016, the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second.[57] In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second leading some to question the scalability of Ethereum.[58] On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time.[59] The proof-of-work system, alongside the chaining of blocks, makes modifications of the blockchain extremely hard, as an attacker must modify all subsequent blocks in order for the modifications of one block to be accepted.[87] As new blocks are mined all the time, the difficulty of modifying a block increases as time passes and the number of subsequent blocks (also called confirmations of the given block) increases.[75] ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Joshua A. Kroll; Ian C. Davey; Edward W. Felten (11–12 June 2013). "The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries" (PDF). The Twelfth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2013). Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 May 2016. Retrieved 26 April 2016. A transaction fee is like a tip or gratuity left for the miner. الجدير بالذكر بأن بعض المواقع كانت تنشر سابقا تقديرا لمقدار الخسارة/ الربح الذي يُسجله المنقبون لكن يبدو بأنهم توقفوا عن القيام بذلك لأسباب نجهلها. قد يعتقد البعض بأنه لم يكن بالإمكان إعطاء تقدير دقيق لمقدار الخسارة أو الربح الذي يُسجله المنقبون، ولذلك تم التخلص من ذلك. إلا أنه من المُمكن جدا أنه تم التخلص من ذلك لكيلا يتم تنفير المُنقبين من عمليات التنقيب.
بيتكوين ليست العملة الافتراضية الوحيدة المتواجدة حاليًا في الأسواق الافتراضية. فقد برزت بفضل نجاحات ال بيتكوين ، مجموعة متنوعة من ما يسمى ب "altcoins" أو العملات الافتراضية البديلة ذات قيمة جيدة في الأسواق. أهم الفروقات بين البيتكوين وهذه العملات البديلة هي: البتكوين الأصعب في التعدين والأكثر غلاءً بينما العملات البديلة يمكن الحصول عليها عادةً بطريقة أسهل وأرخص، ويمكن أن يكون سعرها أكثر ثباتًا من سعر البتكوين ذات السعر المتقلب، كما أنّ الكثير من هذه العملات تم إنشاؤها لتلافي المشاكل الحاصلة في نظام بتكوين.[20] هذه لائحة بست عملات رقمية بديلة :
The "Metropolis Part 1: Byzantium" soft[citation needed] fork took effect on 16 October 2017, and included changes to reduce the complexity of the EVM and provide more flexibility for smart contract developers. Byzantium also added supports for zk-SNARKs (from Zcash), with the first zk-SNARK transaction occurring on testnet on September 19, 2017.[citation needed] Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates, including Robert Shiller,[193] Joseph Stiglitz,[194] and Richard Thaler.[195][14] Noted Keyensian economist Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column criticizing bitcoin, calling it a bubble and a fraud;[196] and professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University called bitcoin the "mother of all bubbles."[197] Central bankers, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan,[198] investors such as Warren Buffett,[199][200] and George Soros[201] have stated similar views, as have business executives such as Jamie Dimon and Jack Ma.[202]
By comparison to government-backed global currencies, Bitcoin remains fairly complex for the typical user to acquire and use in regular transactions. Growing interest and significant global investments in Bitcoin wallet and Blockchain technology have nonetheless made buying and selling Bitcoin far more accessible to the average user. And indeed growing acceptance by government entities have ameliorated the ambiguity of legal and regulatory status for Bitcoin and Bitcoin exchanges. Ethereum blockchain applications are usually referred to as DApps (decentralized application), since they are based on the decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine, and its smart contracts.[46] Many uses have been proposed for Ethereum platform, including ones that are impossible or unfeasible.[47][33] Use case proposals have included finance, the internet-of-things, farm-to-table produce, electricity sourcing and pricing, and sports betting. Ethereum is (as of 2017) the leading blockchain platform for initial coin offering projects, with over 50% market share.

While another less aggressive soft fork solution was put forth, the Ethereum community and its founders were placed in a perilous position. If they didn’t retrieve the stolen investor money, confidence in Ethereum could be lost. On the other hand, recovering investor money required actions that went against the core ideas of decentralization and set a dangerous precedent. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini Trust Co. exchange, reported that they had cut their paper wallets into pieces and stored them in envelopes distributed to safe deposit boxes across the United States.[101] Through this system, the theft of one envelope would neither allow the thief to steal any bitcoins nor deprive the rightful owners of their access to them.[100] The "Metropolis Part 1: Byzantium" soft[citation needed] fork took effect on 16 October 2017, and included changes to reduce the complexity of the EVM and provide more flexibility for smart contract developers. Byzantium also added supports for zk-SNARKs (from Zcash), with the first zk-SNARK transaction occurring on testnet on September 19, 2017.[citation needed]
The domain name "bitcoin.org" was registered on 18 August 2008.[17] On 31 October 2008, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System[4] was posted to a cryptography mailing list.[18] Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open-source code and released it in January 2009.[19][20][11] Nakamoto's identity remains unknown.[10] Bitcoin prices were negatively affected by several hacks or thefts from cryptocurrency exchanges, including thefts from Coincheck in January 2018, Coinrail and Bithumb in June, and Bancor in July. For the first six months of 2018, $761 million worth of cryptocurrencies was reported stolen from exchanges.[64] Bitcoin's price was affected even though other cryptocurrencies were stolen at Coinrail and Bancor as investors worried about the security of cryptocurrency exchanges.[65][66][67]
Until relatively recently, building blockchain applications has required a complex background in coding, cryptography, mathematics as well as significant resources. But times have changed. Previously unimagined applications, from electronic voting & digitally recorded property assets to regulatory compliance & trading are now actively being developed and deployed faster than ever before. By providing developers with the tools to build decentralized applications, Ethereum is making all of this possible. As the industry continues to investigate blockchain platforms, it’s apparent that Ethereum is becoming a de facto leader. For example, a few days ago JPMorgan publicly open-sourced its Quorum platform, architected and developed around the Go Ethereum client by Jeff Wilcke and his team. Several other major banks are using Ethereum, and Microsoft is anchoring its Bletchley platform on it as the foundational blockchain element. Industry, both publicly and confidentially, continues to contribute to Ethereum and work with us and others to help our promising, toddler-age codebase reach maturity. Stay tuned for news on this front. In the end, the majority of the Ethereum community voted to perform a hard fork, and retrieve The DAO investors money. But not everyone agreed with this course of action. This resulted in a split where two parallel blockchains now exist. For those members who strongly disagree with any changes to the blockchain even when hacking occurs there is Ethereum classic. For the majority who agreed to rewrite a small part of the blockchain and return the stolen money to their owners, there is Ethereum.
J. P. Morgan Chase is developing JPM Coin on a permissioned-variant of Ethereum blockchain dubbed "Quorum".[53] It's designed to toe the line between private and public in the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. The idea is to satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on, while protecting the privacy of parties that don't wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public.[54] The use of bitcoin by criminals has attracted the attention of financial regulators, legislative bodies, law enforcement, and the media.[218] In the United States, the FBI prepared an intelligence assessment,[219] the SEC issued a pointed warning about investment schemes using virtual currencies,[218] and the U.S. Senate held a hearing on virtual currencies in November 2013.[220] The U.S. government claimed that bitcoin was used to facilitate payments related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[221]
The Bank for International Settlements summarized several criticisms of bitcoin in Chapter V of their 2018 annual report. The criticisms include the lack of stability in bitcoin's price, the high energy consumption, high and variable transactions costs, the poor security and fraud at cryptocurrency exchanges, vulnerability to debasement (from forking), and the influence of miners.[189][190][191] تسمح تطبيقات بيتكوين والتي يُطلق عليها أحيانا اسم عميل بيتكوين للمُستخدمين بالتعامل مع شبكة بيتكوين. في شكله القاعدي يسمح التطبيق بتوليد وحفظ مفاتيح خاصة بالمُستخدم والاتصال بشبكة الند للند الخاص بالعُملة. تم إطلاق أول تطبيق بيتكوين سنة 2009 من طرف ساتوشي ناكاموتو مُؤسس عُملة بيتكوين كتطبيق مجاني ومفتوح المصدر. يُستخدم هذا التطبيق -والذي يُطلق عليه عادة اسم تطبيق ساتوشي- كمحفظة على الحواسيب الشخصية للقيام بعمليات دفع إلكترونية أو كخادوم لاستقبال تلك المدفوعات ولخدمات أخرى مُتعلقة بالدفع. أما تطبيق Bitcoin-Qt فيتم اعتباره كتطبيق مرجعي بحكم أنه يُمثل الآلية التي يعمل من خلالها بروتوكول بيتكوين ويُعتبر مثالا يُحتذى به لغيره من التطبيقات. لدى القيام بعمليات شراء باستخدام الهواتف الذكية فإنه عادة ما يتم استخدام تطبيقات بيتكوين تقوم بتوليد و/أو قراءة QR codes لتسهيل مهمة التحويل والدفع. كما تتوفر حاليا عدة تطبيقات تعمل كخواديم تقوم بتأكيد الإجراءات التي تتم على الشبكة وتقوم بإضافتها كتلة تحويلات.
A demo account is intended to familiarize you with the tools and features of our trading platforms and to facilitate the testing of trading strategies in a risk-free environment. Results achieved on the demo account are hypothetical and no representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve actual profits or losses similar to those achieved in the demo account. Conditions in the demo account cannot always reasonably reflect all of the market conditions that may affect pricing and execution in a live trading environment. Bitcoin has been criticized for the amount of electricity consumed by mining. As of 2015, The Economist estimated that even if all miners used modern facilities, the combined electricity consumption would be 166.7 megawatts (1.46 terawatt-hours per year).[136] At the end of 2017, the global bitcoin mining activity was estimated to consume between one and four gigawatts of electricity.[203] Politico noted that the even high-end estimates of bitcoin's total consumption levels amount to only about 6% of the total power consumed by the global banking sector, and even if bitcoin's consumption levels increased 100 fold from today's levels, bitcoin's consumption would still only amount to about 2% of global power consumption.[204] The Bank for International Settlements summarized several criticisms of bitcoin in Chapter V of their 2018 annual report. The criticisms include the lack of stability in bitcoin's price, the high energy consumption, high and variable transactions costs, the poor security and fraud at cryptocurrency exchanges, vulnerability to debasement (from forking), and the influence of miners.[189][190][191]
Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes. To achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain.[76] About every 10 minutes, a new group of accepted transactions, called a block, is created, added to the blockchain, and quickly published to all nodes, without requiring central oversight. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin was spent, which is needed to prevent double-spending. A conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, but the blockchain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[7]:ch. 5 Despite bringing a number of benefits, decentralized applications aren’t faultless. Because smart contract code is written by humans, smart contracts are only as good as the people who write them. Code bugs or oversights can lead to unintended adverse actions being taken. If a mistake in the code gets exploited, there is no efficient way in which an attack or exploitation can be stopped other than obtaining a network consensus and rewriting the underlying code. This goes against the essence of the blockchain which is meant to be immutable. Also, any action taken by a central party raises serious questions about the decentralized nature of an application.
نيمكوين : مليون هو مجموع عملة ال نيمكوين وهذا يعني أن ال نيمكوين ستكون نادرة نسبيا، بالضبط نفس مستوى ندرة ال بيتكوين . هذا وتساعد ال نيمكوين على إنشاء الإنترنت الغير خاضعة للرقابة، وتنكر السيطرة الحكومية. وهي منصة متعددة الاستخدامات يمكن استخدامها لنظام أسماء النطاقات الغير مركزي والغير منظم، نوع من الإنترنت الخاصة بها. ويمكن أيضا أن تستخدم لإرسال الرسائل، والتصويت، ونظام تسجيل الدخول.

^ Chan, Edwin. "China Plans to Ban Cryptocurrency Mining in Renewed Clampdown". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 10 April 2019. While China was once home to about 70 percent of Bitcoin mining and 90 percent of trades, authorities have waged a nearly two-year campaign to shrink the crypto industry amid concerns over speculative bubbles, fraud and wasteful energy consumption.

The receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was cypherpunk Hal Finney, who created the first reusable proof-of-work system (RPoW) in 2004.[24] Finney downloaded the bitcoin software on its release date, and on 12 January 2009 received ten bitcoins from Nakamoto.[25][26] Other early cypherpunk supporters were creators of bitcoin predecessors: Wei Dai, creator of b-money, and Nick Szabo, creator of bit gold.[21] In 2010, the first known commercial transaction using bitcoin occurred when programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John's pizzas for ₿10,000.[27]
Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January, 2014.[9] During the same time as the conference, a group of people rented a house in Miami Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio, a Torontonian who financed the project.[9] Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin, who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness.[9] Six months later the founders met again in a house in Zug Switzerland, where Buterin told the founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time.[9] Another type of physical wallet called a hardware wallet keeps credentials offline while facilitating transactions.[106] The hardware wallet acts as a computer peripheral and signs transactions as requested by the user, who must press a button on the wallet to confirm that they intended to make the transaction. Hardware wallets never expose their private keys, keeping bitcoins in cold storage even when used with computers that may be compromised by malware.[99]:42–45